Muphry's Law
A reader's summary of the deliberately misspelled cousin of Murphy's Law — John Bangsund's 1992 formulation for an Australian editors' newsletter, its older echoes in Ambrose Bierce and a 1989 Paul Dickson anecdote, and the 2003 Usenet corollary, Skitt's Law, that turned it into the reflex every online grammar correction now triggers.
The law at a glance
Muphry's Law states that if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, your own writing will contain a fault of some kind. The name is itself the demonstration: “Muphry” is a deliberate misspelling of “Murphy,” so the joke is already running before the definition is read. It is not a claim about grammar pedants being unusually careless, but about how closely a piece of writing gets read once it sets itself up as an authority on correctness.
Origin
The name is credited to John Bangsund, a member of the Society of Editors (Victoria) in Australia, who set it down in March 1992 in his column “John Bangsund's Threepenny Planet,” published in the Society's newsletter. Bangsund described it as “the editorial application of the better-known Murphy's Law” — a working joke among professional editors and proofreaders about the occupational hazard of their own trade, coined well before the internet gave it a much larger stage.
History and context
Bangsund was naming something writers had already noticed under other guises. Paul Dickson's 1989 collection of adages credits editor Joseph A. Umhoefer with an earlier version of the same sentiment, “Articles on writing are themselves badly written,” and Ambrose Bierce's 1909 usage guide Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults opens with a similar admission — that no writer's own practice is a court of last appeal, since “writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light,” his own book's inevitable errors included. Variants with different names circulated in parallel — Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation and McKean's Law both describe the same trap in grammar and usage circles. The version that reached the internet at scale, however, is a 2003 corollary attributed to a poster known as Skitt on the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english: any post correcting an error in another post will itself contain at least one error. By 2009, The Telegraph was listing Skitt's Law as the fourth entry in an unofficial top ten of internet rules, evidence it had become general online folklore rather than a newsgroup in-joke.
Main ideas
A deliberate misspelling, not a typo
"Muphry's" is a knowing misspelling of "Murphy's," built into the name itself so the joke works before the reader even gets to the definition: any article criticizing someone else's editing or proofreading will itself contain a fault of some kind, and the name is the first example of it.
Coined by an editor, not a programmer
John Bangsund, a member of the Society of Editors (Victoria) in Australia, set the law down in March 1992 in his column "John Bangsund's Threepenny Planet" in the Society's newsletter, describing it as "the editorial application of the better-known Murphy's Law" — the professional proofreading community named its own occupational hazard before the internet did.
The sentiment predates the name by decades
Bangsund was formalizing something writers had already noticed: Paul Dickson's 1989 collection of adages credits editor Joseph A. Umhoefer with the earlier line "Articles on writing are themselves badly written," and Ambrose Bierce's 1909 usage guide Write It Right admits up front that no writer's own practice is above reproach, since "writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light."
Several names for the same trap
The same observation has been independently packaged more than once — as Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation and as McKean's Law, both circulating in grammar and usage circles before the internet consolidated most of that territory under Bangsund's catchier name.
Skitt's Law gave it a native internet form
A Usenet poster known as Skitt, active on the alt.usage.english newsgroup, is credited around 2003 with the tighter online corollary: any post correcting an error in another post will itself contain at least one error. The Telegraph included it as the fourth entry in a 2009 list of unofficial internet rules, by which point it was travelling as a forum-culture fact rather than a Usenet in-joke.
It now fires on every comment-section correction
Anywhere someone points out a stranger's typo, misused word, or grammatical slip, a reply checking the corrector's own sentence for an error has become close to automatic — the law is invoked less as a citation than as a reflex, the online equivalent of watching to see if the ref who just blew the whistle is standing offside.
Critique
- The evidence is entirely anecdotal. Nobody tallies the corrections that contain no error at all; the law survives on the cases people notice and screenshot, which is a selection effect, not a measured error rate for grammar-policing writing versus any other kind.
- It may describe scrutiny, not error-proneness. A post that corrects someone else invites unusually hostile close-reading in a way an ordinary post does not, so any small slip is far more likely to be caught and publicized — that is a claim about audience behavior, not about correctors writing worse than anyone else.
- The name gets used as a shield. Citing Muphry's Law preemptively (“there's probably a typo in this too”) can function as a way to wave off a correction's substance rather than as a genuine acknowledgment of the same risk everyone runs.
Impact
Muphry's Law is now one of the small set of named internet laws reached for in almost any thread about grammar or fact- checking. It pairs closely with Cunningham's Law as a matched pair about correction online: Cunningham's describes the crowd reliably fixing a confidently wrong post, Muphry's describes the corrector's own post rarely surviving that same scrutiny intact. It also sits next to Brandolini's Law on the asymmetry side of the ledger — where Brandolini measures the cost of refuting a claim, Muphry's measures the near-certainty that the refutation will hand back a small opening of its own.